On Sep 20, 6:32 am, Airyx attbi.com> wrote:

F-22 Squadron Shot Down by the International Date Line
01-Mar-2007 05:35 EST

Aircraft software can be serious business. DID’s F-22A Raptor FOCUS
Article mentioned recent flight software problems that delayed the
aircraft’s first foreign deployment from Hickam AFB in Hawaii to
Kadena AFB, Japan.

What we didn’t mention at the time is how serious the problem was, and
how dependent on computers modern aircraft – including military
aircraft – have become. What follows are relevant excerpts from a CNN
transcript on February 24, 2007 that covered a number of unrelated
issues. We’ve cut that out, and left only the F-22 related section of
the transcript…

KC-10: Life saver…
Maj. Gen. Don Sheppard (ret.): ”...At the international date line,
whoops, all systems dumped and when I say all systems, I mean all
systems, their navigation, part of their communications, their fuel
systems. They were—they could have been in real trouble. They were
with their tankers. The tankers – they tried to reset their systems,
couldn’t get them reset. The tankers brought them back to Hawaii. This
could have been real serious. It certainly could have been real
serious if the weather had been bad. It turned out OK. It was fixed in
48 hours. It was a computer glitch in the millions of lines of code,
somebody made an error in a couple lines of the code and everything
goes.

[snip]

SHEPPERD: Absolutely. When you think of airplanes from the old days,
with cables and that type of thing and direct connections between the
sticks and the yolks and the controls, not that way anymore.
Everything is by computer. When your computers go, your airplanes go.
You have multiple systems. When they all dump at the same time, you
can be in real trouble. Luckily this turned out OK.

John Roberts, CNN anchor: What would have happened General Shepperd if
these brand-new $120 million F-22s had been going into battle?

SHEPPERD: You would have been in real trouble in the middle of combat.
The good thing is that we found this out. Any time—before, you know,
before we get into combat with an airplane like this. Any time you
introduce a new airplane, you are going to find glitches and you are
going to find things that go wrong. It happens in our civilian
airliners. You just don’t hear much about it but these things
absolutely happen. And luckily this time we found out about it before
combat. We got it fixed with tiger teams in about 48 hours and the
airplanes were flying again, completed their deployment. But this
could have been real serious in combat.

ROBERTS: So basically you had these advanced air—not just superiority
but air supremacy fighters that were in there, up there in the air,
above the Pacific Ocean, not much more sophisticated than a little
Cessna 152 only with a jet engine.

SHEPPERD: You got it. They are on a 12 to 15-hour flight from Hawaii
to Okinawa, but all their systems dumped. They needed help. Had they
gotten separated from their tankers or had the weather been bad, they
had no attitude reference. They had no communications or navigation.
They would have turned around and probably could have found the
Hawaiian Islands. But if the weather had been bad on approach, there
could have been real trouble. Again, you get refueling from your
tankers. You don’t run—you don’t get yourself where you run out of
fuel. You always have enough fuel and refueling nine, 10, 11, 12 times
on a flight like this where you can get somewhere to land. But again,
attitude reference and navigation are essential as is communication.
In this case all of that was affected. It was a serious problem.

Yeah? This is the reason for them 'missing' red flag I suppose?
It takes more than a black paint job to make an aircraft workable.
The USSA are not the only people who use RADAR or write
software. As any decent EWO will tell you "the trick is to know
what to look for".

Phhhhttttt. Wishing it doesn't make it so. The Raptor was built
BECAUSE of the Su-30 and MiG 31. The F-35 is never going to
make it as an air superiority fighter, nor is it going to be much
good as a bomb truck. That is the problem when a project attempts
to be all things to all people. You generally end up with a mediocre
fuck-up.

So you can GUESS how a single-engine "thing" will perform by staring
at
a multi-engined air superiority fighter and filling in the details
with
imagination?

Hmmm, fucked software AND the panels falling off....

--------------------------------------
Bad glue causes F-22A mishap
By Stephen Trimble on March 27, 2008 7:34 PM | Permalink | Comments
(0) | TrackBacks (0)
Lockheed Martin delivered the first 30 F-22As with an inadequate
adhesive -- dubbed C493 -- for low observable (LO) coatings.

The manufacturer has since fixed the problem, but the first 30
airframes are stuck with the bad glue.

There's a reason we now know this bit of F-22A arcana. On November 1,
a small patch of LO material sheared off the inlet for the right
engine on takeoff. The material was sucked into the engine, causing
more than $1.2 million in damage.

I reported about the mishap on this blog on Monday, a few days before
the Air Combat Command released the accident investigation report. The
report attirbutes the Class A mishap mainly to the poor adhesive used
to attach the LO to the engine inlet.

-------------------------------

Pilot stuck in new F-22 .... where's the %%$#@! handle ? !

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Last week, Lockheed Martin announced that its profits were up a hefty
60 percent in the first quarter.
Now, if the company could just figure out how to put a door handle on
its new $ 361 million F-22 fighter, its prospects would really soar.

On April 10, ( 2006 ) at Langley Air Force Base, an F-22 pilot, Capt.
Brad Spears, was locked inside the cockpit of his aircraft for five
hours. No one in the U.S. Air Force or from Lockheed Martin could
figure out how to open the aircraft's canopy.
At about 1:15 pm , chainsaw-wielding firefighters from the 1st Fighter
Wing finally extracted Spears after they cut through the F-22's three-
quarter inch-thick polycarbonate canopy.

Total damage to the airplane, according to sources inside the
Pentagon: $1.28 million. Not only did the firefighters ruin the
canopy, which cost $286,000, they also scuffed the coating on the
airplane's skin which will cost about $1 million to replace.

The Pentagon currently plans to buy 181 copies of the F-22 from
Lockheed Martin, the world's biggest weapons vendor. The total price
tag : $65.4 billion.

The incident at Langley has many Pentagon watchers shaking their
heads. Tom Christie, the former director of testing and evaluation for
the DOD, calls the F-22 incident at Langley incredible. " God knows
what'll happen next," said Christie, who points out that the F-22 has
about two million lines of code in its software system. "This thing is
so software intensive. You can't check out every line of code."

For the sake of comparison, Windows XP, one of the most common
computer operating systems, contains about 45 million lines of code.
If any of that code fails, then the computer that's running it simply
stops working. It won't cause that computer to fall out of the sky.
If any of the F-22's two million lines of computer code go bad, then
the pilot can die, or, perhaps, just get trapped in the cockpit.

One analyst inside the Pentagon who has followed the F-22 for years
said :
"Everyone's incredulous. They're asking can this really have
happened ?"
As for Lockheed Martin, the source said, " Whatever the problem was,
the people who built it should know how to open the canopy."

Given that the U.S. military is Lockheed Martin's biggest client,
perhaps the company could provide the Air Force with a supply of slim
jims or coat hangers, just in case another F-22 pilot gets stuck at
the controls.
As if the latest canopy shenanigans weren't bad enough, on May 1,
Defense News reported that there are serious structural problems with
the F-22. Seems the titanium hull of the aircraft isn't meshing as
well as it should. Naturally, taxpayers have to foot the bill for the
mistake (improper heat-treating of the titanium) which is found on 90
aircraft.
The cost of repairing those wrinkles? Another $1 billion or so.

More piccies of a trashed Raptor and a VERY pissed off looking pilot.
I wonder what happens when the EJECT button is toggled!
Whoops!

http://www.advrider.com/forums/showthread.php?t=233299

Here's an F-22 debugging it's landing software....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ieef0tLrv9c

And from F-16.NET, always a pretty good read IMO..

The F-35 returns to flight this afternoon at NAS Fort Worth, Lockheed-
Martin facility on December 7th, 2007. Defence and corporate interests
are working hand in hand to see that Australia commits to the largest
defence purchase in history: The Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike
Fighter (JSF). The problems with this venture are many. First
Australia, Defence White Paper or no, can’t cobble together a roadmap
for the long term Defence of the Australian public. There is so much
poor input into this process that a path for the security of Australia
won’t be worth the paper it is written on. Second, sales people get
paid to sell stuff. This means that that given the record of
management by Defence on big dollar, high profile weapons purchases
which is poor, going for yet more high risk, high dollar weapons
systems is asking for more trouble. A slick sales effort and it’s off
to the races with the taxpayer’s money and little or no solid research
to stand on for justification of the purchase. Third, in the case of
the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), it isn’t ready to be sold any
time soon. Why? An intelligent buying decision can hardly be made for
some years until enough test hours are flown and the development of
the aircraft has real tangible qualities one can point to in a fighter
aircraft. Until a significant amount of maturity shows up in the F-35
program, any premature buying decision is no different than putting
billions of dollars of the taxpayers money down on the roulette wheel
and hoping for the best.

The lack of long range aircraft buying strategy by Defence is
alarming. For example, Defence is basing the defence of the nation
around an aircraft, the F-35, that has little substance. Years ago,
Defence made the high risk decision to cut off a valid competition
composed of a variety of proven aircraft in favor of the then
vaporware F-35. This decision robbed the taxpayer of value. How? This
decision put the RAAF at risk. By going with what was really an
unknown delivery date to anyone who knows the gestation period of new
aircraft types, the RAAF would flying an aged aircraft well beyond
it’s useful life: The legacy F-18 Hornet.

Today, Defence is still wasting billions keeping the old F-18 around
when it could have been long replaced. For example: The F-18 was never
meant to be refurbished. It was meant to be flown a set amount of
hours and thrown into the trash. Yet Defence has wasted almost a
billion dollars trying to replace the center fuselage area of the
aircraft called the center barrel. This repair is called CBR. CBR
won’t return much value on the dollar. Even the U.S. Navy, who
discovered CBR in a one-off event to fix a then new F-18 that got
wrecked, doesn’t see enough value in the CBR process to continue it.
And at this time only the U.S. Navy has the resources needed to
sustain such an effort. CBR is an expensive and slow set of tasks.
Canada, who also flies old F-18’s is shying away from CBR too.

Not long after the ink was dry on Australia’s deal to start CBR on
it’s aging F-18s, Defence had to backpedal and admit that they didn’t
know how to properly manage a CBR process. Mistakes on making the old
F-18 combat worthy don’t stop there. Some years ago there was the goof
up of getting the right electronic defensive kit for the aircraft.
After wasting money on one poorly researched vendor, Defence had to
waste more money by switching vendors after the first one failed to
deliver a working product . In the end the F-18 got it’s electronic
defensive gear, but what does the taxpayer get in return? Money thrown
into an airframe that could have been replaced long ago.

Next is the F-18 Super Hornet debacle. While the Super Hornet may be
good for the U.S. Navy based solely on the fact that it is the only
U.S. carrier fighter in production and has a new car smell, it makes a
poor fit for Australia. Even if one ignores the poor justification for
getting the aircraft: A fib that the F-111 was at risk of falling
apart based on a faulty fatigue test. One has to also consider other
things about the Super Hornet purchase. It was done in a hurry based
on little solid threat analysis and was bought on the premise of
wasting supplemental taxpayer money outside of the normal Defence
budget. This impulse buy, not unlike the kind for those with little
restraint or children who see something tasty at the checkout counter,
means that Defence has no solid grasp of how to manage a long range
lifecycle plan for the kinds of combat aircraft needed to defend the
nation.

In the case of Australia’s involvement in the F-35 project, the amount
of the hype and blind faith Defence and industry heap on the unaware
taxpayer is alarming. For example, supposed defence experts and
pundits get up in front of Parliament and spin yarns about all of the
great things of netcentric warfare (NCW). The religious zealots of NCW
state that because every weapons platform: Ship, plane, tank is
networked that it will make “us” better than “them” in any combat
imagined. And that the F-35 will have this and isn’t that grand? What
isn’t stated are the numerous limitations experienced by the biggest
NCW users in combat: The U.S. military. For example there are
significant frequency range and bandwidth limits in NCW. While NCW is
useful, it is not an all powerful weapon. It is only a helper for
military leaders that know what they are doing and have backup plans
in case NCW is made unavailable in combat.

Those that over-sell NCW to a clueless Australian Parliament also
don’t mention, (or don’t know) that a clever enemy has devised ways of
limiting and even defeating NCW ability. Then too, at this time or
anytime into the near future, there is no credible advanced network to
put into the F-35 or any stealth fighter before it that doesn’t have
significant limitations. This includes the fact that in a recent
Lockheed Martin brief to Norway who is also considering the F-35, that
the network hyped for F-35 use was a Link-16 kit: A network setup
common with other current combat aircraft.

The Norway brief gets more ugly when looking at any value attached to
an F-35 purchase decision assuming all of the Buck Rogers gear
promised for it works as advertised. For example a previous Norway
briefing stated that the F-35 would have a 740 mile combat radius and
cruise around 32,000-40,000 ft. This sounds great until you consider
that the recent Norway brief clarifies this more. It states that the
jet will do a 725 mile or so combat radius but there is a lot more to
this figure that is quite damning. It states that this figure is with
external fuel tanks and that the F-35 will meet it’s stated 600 mile
or so combat radius on internal fuel only.

The problem with this little sleight of hand is that back in 2006, the
U.S. Department of Defense let out a contract to make some changes on
the kind of stores (weapons and appliances) that would be hung on the
jet by the end of the aircraft development phase. In that contract the
qualification of external fuel tanks were removed from the F-35
program.How will the F-35 hang external tanks is anyone’s guess until
the DOD lets some cash for that to happen.

Yet another warning to the buyer is that this clarification of combat
radius in the latest Norway brief came with a rude surprise. That is,
that the cruise altitude for the shown example mission would be at
25,000ft or less. What does this mean? Well first when your salesman
doesn’t tell you about the lack of external tanks that’s one thing.
The low cruise altitude means that this aircraft is heavy.

If people would relax and put the F-35 into context of what it is: a
strike aircraft, that altitude thing would be OK. However there are
those that are hawking the machine as an all killing reaper against
top end air-to-air threats and advanced surface-to-air threats, which
is a big reach considering the powerplant is of the slightly lower
altitude kind, no super-cruise requirement in the design (going
sustained super-sonic speeds with no fuel drinking afterburner a-la
F-22) and the issue of weight hanging on high wing-loading.

So senior Australian Defence officials and industry are trying to get
the taxpayer to bet their hard earned money on what? Well, besides
what the slick sales effort would have the gullible believe, a smart
buyer should seriously wonder. Here the aircraft has only performed a
very small amount of flight test hours and there is a significant
amount of weapons system equipment yet to be proven. The F-35 is a
very complex weapon system. The first delivery to an actual user isn’t
far away: 2012 for initial operating capability for the U.S. Marines.
Speaking of which, a USMC General , scared about the big gapping hole
of old fighter aircraft staring the U.S. military in the face in the
coming years stated something to the effect that even if the F-35
showed up with less capability he needed it right away. He may get his
wish yet what will he get? Consider that the Marines won’t know if
their Short-Take-Off-Vertical-Landing (STOVL) variants can even do
such fancy take-offs and landings until sometime in 2009. And the big
one: Blocks.

Blocks are stages of capability of the F-35 as it is developed. Block
I will have a basic capability of some small worth. Block 2 will have
more capability (more weapons ability and such) and so on. What
defines the amount of weapons capability of the F-35 in Blocks 1, 2
and 3 have been watered down some since 2006. So much so that there
are a lot of weapons capability one would expect on a real combat jet,
that don’t show up until Block 4, 5 and 6. Or so we hope according to
the latest Norway briefing. For example, one would think Blue Force
Tracking, a network aid that shows the location of friendly ground
forces would be delivered to the customer early-on. After all, it is a
strike fighter. This doesn’t show up until Block 6. How about
electronic attack and all the wonderful hype shown in those glossy
PowerPoint briefings of F-35 electronic attack prowess? Well, that
would be a much later Block 6. That of course is after they get the
“power/thermal management improvement” figured out in Block 4.
Speaking of Block 4, what the heck is “airframe life extension”? What
kind of airframe is a Block 2 and 3 early F-35 user getting? One can
look at the Block list from the Norway brief and consider that a lot
the stuff you see in F-35’s proposed Block 4, 5 and 6 show up as
standard equipment in today’s combat aircraft. What gives? And… Block
I, 2 and 3 have a long way to go before proof of life.

So, back to Australia’s intrepid Defence leadership. They are happily
showing all of the F-35 virtues based on nothing really except what
the U.S. reports on the aircraft’s development progress. This is
hardly any kind of strong platform to base a buying decision on that
could top out at up to at least $16 billion dollars. More like a house
of cards. What is truly astonishing are the sheep-like sounds of the
Australian news media which has little ability to see any of the risks
offered by the F-35 program. Even the crazy guy Maggot in the movie,
The Dirty Dozen, saw judgment day coming.

For now, a spendthrift Australian Defence leadership is happy to herd
the sheep (some of those in Parliament) right along to what may be
certain doom. Without a strong and realistic analysis by an Australian
Parliament of this very high risk project, the Australian taxpayer is
going to be picking up not only the billions put into a F-35 Joint
Strike Fighter decision, but billions more to clean up the mess should
risk turn into failure.

And the F-22 is a GOOD plane. The F-35 is a joke.
The JSF is fast turning into the biggest fuckup in procurement EVER,
and given the track record of the Howard ninnies, that is some
statement.
I was rather hoping the Rudd ninnies would do better. Still
hoping; not holding breath.

Mark Addinall.